The Cornerhouse in Manchester, which closes this weekend with a rave
Photograph: Cornerhouse

For 30 years it has been the bedrock of Manchester’s cultural life, serving as a meeting point and drinking hole for the city’s independent minds, as well as an arthouse cinema and gallery.

But on Saturday the much-loved Cornerhouse will close its doors for good as the whole enterprise moves up the road and into HOME, a £25m, multi-disciplinary arts centre billed as the largest in England outside London.

Determined to go out with a bang, the directors have organised a music event and art performance to bid the building farewell, featuring a troupe of drag queens, a gang of female bikers, a team of synchronised swimmers marooned on dry land, as well as group of disabled people on mobility scooters.

The latter are taking part in The Storming, a mass participation artwork by Panamanian artist Humberto Vélez, which kicks off the wake at 4pm. It takes inspiration from Storming the Winter Palace, an incredible “mass spectacle” featuring 10,000 people staged in 1920 Soviet Russia to mark the anniversary of the 1917 communist revolution.

Participants in The Storming by artist Humberto Vélez to mark the closure of the Cornerhouse in Manchester Photograph: Cornerhouse

At 9pm part two will get underway with a musical and theatrical extravaganza curated by DJ and arts producer Greg Thorpe.

Manchester’s past and present club scenes will be represented, including a set from Smiths drummer Mike Joyce, one of several generations of Manchester musicians who have performed at the Cornerhouse. Closing the night will be Graham Massey, DJ and founding member of 808 State. He was one of the first acts to play the venue when it opened in 1985, bookending the life-story of what Jonathan Schofield, the author of Manchester: the Complete Guide, says is a genuine institution.

“Usually when people call something an institution they are churning out a meaningless phrase. But the Cornerhouse really is. It defined a new contemporary and perhaps continental way of looking at the world and I’m deeply nostalgic about it,” he said.

“What it brought to Manchester in 1985 was contemporary bar culture. It looked shiny, it looked new, it wasn’t an old pub with a club night upstairs that smelled like a rat hole. You’ve got to remember back then that the city centre was a dark night of the soul.”

It also offered the first decent cappuccino in the city since the rock’n’roll days of the 1950s, added Schofield, who was 21 when Cornerhouse opened its doors.

Situated, as its name suggests, on the corner of Oxford Road and Whitworth Street, Cornerhouse was the brainchild of long-serving local MP, Sir Gerald Kaufman, and businessman Sir Bob Scott. Long before either received their knighthoods, the pair decided it was a travesty that Manchester had no arthouse cinema and resolved to build one.

Shaw’s furniture showroom proved the perfect site, the meeting point between town and gown, where commuters could grab a beer before getting the train back to the Shires from Oxford Road station and university students and professors could get their fix of subtitled films.

Next month will see the grand opening of HOME, which includes: a 450-seat theatre; a 150-seat flexible theatre space; a 500 sq metre, 4 metre-high flexible gallery space, five cinema screens; digital production and broadcast facilities; a bar; a cafe; cinema bar; and a bookshop.

There have been fears that the Cornerhouse site would join the Hacienda , the Twisted Wheel and many other venues in the city which have been bulldozed and turned into yet another glass-walled office, hotel or block of student flats. But last week Manchester Metropolitan University announced it had signed a three-year lease to use the site as a teaching space.

On Thursday the lightbox outside Cornerhouse 1, the first English building designed by architect David Chipperfield, announced its final film. Among those inside watching David Lynch’s Blue Velvet was Tristan Burke, who rose to fame as captain of University of Manchester’s winning University Challenge team in 2012.

“Where I grew up there was no cinema so I only discovered cinephilia when I first came to Manchester and the Cornerhouse provided a parallel education in culture alongside my university studies,” said Burke, originally from Ilkley.

“I watched countless films here, beginning with GW Pabst’s Pandora’s Box on 27 January 2007. And I’ve got drunk in here, kissed people in here, had the most wonderful conversations in here. This building has been absolutely pivotal in my life and my sense of my subjectivity. I will miss it terribly. Goodbye Cornerhouse.”